


The Bet

by Mavrick



Series: I. how it ends [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Canon Show Dynamics, Childhood, Childhood Friends, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Pre-Canon, Vibe fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-15 17:13:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28567518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mavrick/pseuds/Mavrick
Summary: It was easy to forget that there was a time before they were best friends. In fact, for a brief period when they were 12, Vanya could confidently say that Five was born an unapologetic shitheel.
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy & Vanya Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves
Series: I. how it ends [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2093145
Comments: 1
Kudos: 31





	The Bet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fiveyaaas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiveyaaas/gifts).



> This one's for Tori! Thank you for being such a fun presence in the fandom 🌸🌸🌸

Don't let moments pass along

And waste before your eyes

March with me and the borogoves

Come with me and the slithy toves

And never ask us why

 _\- Come Along_ , Cosmo Sheldrake

* * *

Multivariable calculus isn’t particularly complicated but after an hour of staring blankly at the same page, Five was getting close to admitting defeat.

The problem wasn’t even that it was difficult to understand. No, unlike most people, Five found math to be the most straightforward thing to exist in the history of the world. The _problem_ lied in that the jubilant noise of his siblings in the hallway across his room made the black-and-white text of his copy of _Quantum Mechanics and Physical Reality_ seem rather dull in comparison. The sounds of Allison’s laughter, coupled with Diego and Klaus’s non-stop heckling made it difficult to keep his mind on the paragraph he’s been trying to read for the nth time.

One would think that, with the Hargreeves estate taking up an entire corner of the city, there would be enough space for everyone to leave him with a little peace to hear himself think.

But _no_.

Everyone was a walking disaster that was determined to make their presence known and Five was nearing the end of his patience.

When they weren’t busy talking about nonsensical things right in front of his door, they were barging into his room or each other’s rooms. Both, when the others get in the mood to play tag.

Except for perhaps Vanya, he notes.

After the Umbrella Academy’s public debut when they were 10, Vanya seemed to hang around them less and less. He idly wonders what she gets up to these days now that little Number Seven had more time to herself.

She’s up to something, he thinks, because she still seems busy. With _what_ , he didn’t know, but it was difficult to miss the extra spring in her step after gloomy weeks of staring longingly after their merry little group.

Whatever it was, at least it was quiet.

Vanya was reliable like that. Like any group of 12-year olds, the Hargreeves children clung to role identity. Five was the smart one, Klaus was the fun one, and so on. Vanya was undoubtedly the quietest one of them all.

Or so Five assumes until his train of thought gets cut off by a particularly sharp, discordant tone.

When he opens his door to yell at Klaus (the usual suspect) or Diego (his usual cohort), irritation turns to bewilderment and simmers into curiosity as he realizes that the thrum of noise that’s been growing more and more incessant had been coming from _Vanya_ ’s room.

Her bedroom door, usually kept tightly closed, was marginally open but it was enough for him to see her scrunch her face in concentration, holding a violin and tentatively pulling a bow across.

She was playing the same note, he notices, over and over again. He watches her readjust her grip on the bow and vary its speed, face fixed in a slight frown until she seems satisfied at hitting a particularly resonant note.

It _rang_.

Five could make out the small vibrations in the air, almost reminiscent of the thrum of his own powers. Vanya bowed faster, still hitting the same note with increasing ferocity, the ringing sensation only growing with each stroke.

It isn’t particularly pleasant to the ears but Five leans in, causing the door to creak as his weight pushed it open further.

It catches Vanya’s attention, straightening with a small jump like a rabbit caught in headlights.

“Five,” she says, lowering her instrument. “What are you doing here?”

“You left the door open,” he replies.

She flushes, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

“Right. I hope I didn’t disturb you?” She offers.

He raises an eyebrow.

“Too late for that,” he says.

He gives her room a cursory glance, feigning disinterest in a way that makes her feel self-conscious.

_How long has he been standing there?_ She wonders.

She wasn’t really used to having people in her room, partly because there wasn’t a lot going on in there and partly because Sir Reginald Hargreeves had instructed everyone not to cause her any extra distress lest her prescription need an increase in dosage. It was usually up to her to wander into her siblings’ space if she wanted to see any sort of action.

“Sorry, it’s just that I’ve been trying to get this piece for four hours,” she says, distantly aware that she was rambling. “So my arm’s getting a little tired. And my feet—I mean, you can technically sit down but Miss Hahn says I need to work on my posture.”

Five just looks at her incredulously. _Four hours?_ He must have really zoned out there if he missed that.

“I didn’t know you could play the violin.”

“Yeah. I had music class so I figured I’d ask,” she answers.

“And this is just for class?” He prods.

She tilts her head to the side a bit in. “Well…I kind of really like it,” she says shyly.

_Oh boy,_ Five grimaces.

Four hours every day of this? He was never going to get any work done.

“Can you do that somewhere else?” He asks.

“What?” Vanya says, face scrunching in confusion.

“Vanya your room is right across mine. I can’t focus with all that,” he does a vague hand gesture in lieu of any actual explanation. She’d understand. She was the one making it so surely she knew about the ringing sound she was mas producing.

Vanya frowns at him

“No,” she says, staring at him as if he’d just asked her to climb the El Capitan summit with her bare hands.

“What do you mean ‘no’?” He repeats after her, surprised at the girl’s reaction.

“This is my room. I don’t see why I can’t practice here,” she told him.

“It’s distracting!” He protested.

“So is Klaus but _you_ don’t tell him to move,” Vanya pointed out.

_But that’s different_ , he wanted to say. It wasn’t just about the noise. Even now he could already see himself hyper-focusing on whatever was going on with her violin the way a cat hyper-focuses on a shiny object. It was just unnecessary and easier to nip it in the bud while he still can.

“Inaccurate. I like to start my day by reminding him I would very much leave him stranded in Surabaya to keep things quiet around here if given the chance.”

Not that he could actually jump that far yet, as Klaus liked to remind _him_. Still, the thought that he _could_ do it one day was nice. Which is exactly why he needed to be able to concentrate on figuring out how to get that to happen.

“I’m not moving, Five.” Vanya reiterated, shooting him a hard stare. “And I really need to get back to practice. Do you mind?”

And that was how Five gets effectively thrown out of her room for the first time.

As he stared after her as she closes the door, he knew it wouldn’t be the last.

* * *

Vanya doesn’t talk to him much after that. In fact, she spends it in loud silence and pointed avoidance.

It bothers him for the rest of the week. It was fine, at first. Nothing of had changed in any significant way. The earth still spun on its axis, Sir Hargreeves was still an ass, and they still had to be out of bed by 06:00 just like every day that came before. But for some reason, Five could _swear_ he could hear the ringing even behind his own door.

The others are of no help. Ben and Klaus, whose rooms are closest to theirs, had no qualms about it. Vanya always kept her door closed and more often played in tune than not.

Besides, the two of them made more noise combined than she did and was in no position to chime in, though it wasn’t her _volume_ Five took issue with.

He tries to convince Vanya of this, to no avail.

When he first set out to talk to her about it, she suggested that he was just thinking about it too much. That he was just focusing on her, possibly to bully her. It was almost impossible to talk to her about it; whenever he brings up the ringing and tried to compare it to the humming of the atmosphere when he bent space, she grows even more cross with him, believing him to be mocking her for her lack of powers and her attempts at “ _making_ something of hers into something special”.

Unwilling to let himself be misunderstood, Five _may_ have gone a little overboard on trying to explain himself too much and ended up talking over her at times. Vanya did _not_ like this.

It becomes such a recurring argument between them that eventually even the typically docile Vanya had started to grow passive-aggressive in her interactions with him whenever they crossed paths.

The quarrel reaches a tipping point one day when the rest of the Academy had just come up to their bedrooms from a heavy day of training and were causing a bit of a commotion while waiting in line to use the bathroom.

Allison had been arguing with Ben over who got to use the shower first. Luther stood at the back of the line, content to let the others finish their business first, while Diego yelled at them to just hurry up so the rest of them could use the showers, too.

“Careful, you might want to keep it down,” she says as she passes by them.

“You don’t want to annoy Five with the sound of your breathing,” she continues almost as an afterthought.

Allison, Diego, and Luther shared surprised looks, having been relatively unaware of the tension building between her and Five.

“What did you say?”

She didn’t need to turn around to know that she’d been caught, but she still met Five’s trademark glare.

“You heard me.”

He narrows his eyes at her.

“You need to stop that,” he warns.

“Or what?” She challenges him. “What will you do, Five? Harass me every time you see me?”

They stare each other down, sizing the other up.

Let it be known that Five wasn’t above hitting a girl but that rules tend to change when it came to Vanya. She isn’t like Allison. Even with plain old rough-housing, she was the type of person you never included in games because they’d cry and it wouldn’t be fun anymore.

With Allison, he could get away with the occasional shove and poke. More importantly: she fought back and when she did, she fought like the rest of them.

While Five had a short temper, Vanya was known more for ending fights than starting them, and this had been the longest one she’d been in yet. It was enlightening in that, much like everyone else, this was the first time Five sees how she fights.

It just so happened that she fought dirty.

Vanya _knew_ everyone babied her. That much he can see as she refused to break eye contact, goading him, knowing that there was no way he could touch her without severe repercussions.

Not that he would have hit her. Everything about the timid girl made any act of malevolence feel like kicking a puppy. So it was almost insulting that the moment he stepped so much as an inch towards her to glare at her more, Luther already had a warning grip on his arm, and understanding dawned on him as he made out the tiniest flick of the corner of her mouth.

Vanya _wanted_ to fight.

_She_ knew that _he_ can see right through her.

_Alright,_ he thinks. _You want to test me? Let’s dance._

It’s easy enough to call for a family meeting.

After lunch, when they all change out of their training gear, well-fed and ready for bloodshed, the seven children move from the dining hall to the living room, where they have their first complete meeting in a while.

Luther, as was becoming more common, led the floor with opening statements regarding the team’s performance in the past week as well as reminders for the rest of the Umbrella Academy members, before addressing the glaring contest happening between Five and Vanya.

Allison was moderating. A terrible idea, Five thinks, but Vanya was usually the one trying to help mediate. That she wasn’t playing peacemaker in this one felt odd, but more pressing of a concern to Five was the fact that despite the two sisters growing more distant, it was clear that Allison was on Vanya’s side.

Which meant that she wasn’t moderating much at all.

“I just think,” he says through gritted teeth, “that the most sensible solution is for you to find somewhere else to practice.”

“No. Why do you get to decide what I can’t do?” Vanya says firmly. “In my own room, no less!”

“Oh gee, let me think,” he said, scrunching his eyebrows in a false display of contemplation. “ _Maybe_ , seeing as we live right across each other, I should have a say in when you can interrupt my sleep when I _almost got shot at_ last week on a mission!”

“That sounds like _your_ problem,” she replies. “And you were still up well after I packed up!”

“Because I was trying to finish my calculations for consecutive spatial jumps! Which I couldn’t do while _you_ were making those weird ringing sounds.”

“It’s called music—”

Klaus made a non-committal noise that caused Ben to stifle a snicker.

“—I don’t even play past eight _and_ you have plenty of time to work on your calculations during our break periods. _And_ I have an exam coming up. I need to practice,” she argues.

“You make this _sound_ that’s—”

“ _Everyone makes noise_. Surprise! That’s what happens when you _live in a_ _house full of people,”_ she said pointedly. “Why am I the only one you single out?”

Five pinches the bridge of his nose.

“—I didn’t say you were noisy, I said that you were _distracting—_ ”

“I don’t see you trying to getting on everyone else’s case on shutting up. If I have to stop, then everyone else should, too.”

This stirs some amount of protests from the rest of their siblings, all of which Five ignores in favor of trying to get his point across.

“I never said I wanted you to shut up,” he says with a herculean effort to stay patient. It was made difficult by having to repeat himself since _clearly,_ Vanya was determined to misunderstand him.

“I’m just saying you need to find somewhere else to do it—”

“That’s enough.”

Their meeting gets cut short by the appearance of their adoptive father, Sir Reginald Hargreeves.

All chatter died down as the room echoed the steady sound of the billionaire’s footsteps on the hardwood floor.

When he reaches them, everyone straightens their posture out of habit (drilled in by years of getting corrected by Reginald’s cane) while Luther was full-on standing at attention.

“Number Seven will be continuing her studies.”

“But—!”

Hargreeves raises a hand to cut off Five’s protests.

“Learning an instrument requires patience and diligence, traits that you would do well to learn yourself, Number Five,” he pins him a stern look. Vanya preens a little from the roundabout praise. It doesn’t last.

“If learning to play the violin is how your sister wants to spend her time as an inactive member of the Umbrella Academy then let her be—”

There goes that good feeling.

Vanya closes her eyes and lets out a sigh.

“—she doesn’t have the burden of your responsibilities to keep her busy and normalcy isn’t an excuse to waste away. Music is a noble enough pursuit to keep her occupied as any.”

_Right._ _He really does have to ruin everything, doesn’t he?_ Vanya couldn’t help but think. _Just a pretty little waste of space, am I? I’ll show him._

Vanya stubbornly held her chin up.

“However,” the man continued, “that leaves the matter of your living disputes, yes? I suppose I can arrange something. _If_ you can prove yourselves worthy.”

Five and Vanya exchanged wary looks.

There was a sparkle in his eyes as he says this—one that Five knew could only lead to no good. It was one he’d often get just as he’d instruct him to pull an extra mile or wonder about the accuracy of Diego’s projectile range and have him test it on Five.

“As it happens, I’m having the west wing renovated. This means that the second floor on the dormitories will be free for occupation once the audiovisual equipment is out of storage,” he baits at them. It was a good one, too, and had everyone paying more attention now. Diego leaned forward in interest and Klaus nodded along excitedly.

The old AVR was twice as large as their standard bedrooms and, being a complete flight of stairs away, well-isolated from the rest.

Vanya could practice for as long as she’d like without interruption. Five could have space and, more importantly, the utter lack of siblings to worry about in the morning.

It would be the best room in the house to date.

So of course Hargreeves would want them to tear each other apart for it.

“Whoever can prove that they can best put it to use can have it,” Hargreeves says, walking away as if he hadn’t the faintest idea of the chaos he incited in his wake.

* * *

They’re given a month to prepare.

The week following the declaration of their father’s latest manipulations was a strange one for the Hargreeves. While competition wasn’t out of place among the budding superheroes, it was a first in a long while that both Luther _and_ Allison opted out of, already content with the current state of their own room placements.

The rest of the Hargreeves were stuck in a state of casual commitment. Neither Diego nor Klaus, for instance, were known to have the comparatively luxurious bedrooms Luther and Allison enjoyed at the end of their hallway and were motivated enough by a sense of self-interest (Klaus) and bragging rights (Diego) to have thrown in a few attempts of their own at winning the bet. However, it turned out that unless you were fueled by an all-consuming thirst to spite him, creating one-of-a-kind ideas required fortitude and vigor that was a lot more difficult to keep up when you’re going against a scientific wunderkind.

Within the week, Diego went from trying to raise his grades in their general science classes to going back to focus on his disarming techniques. Something that, in his (very loud) opinion, had more real-world applications than some silly bet.

Klaus, in a similar way, had decided that his energy was better spent elsewhere than to even try to go toe-to-toe with either Five (who wasn’t shy about showing his progress) or Vanya (who had somehow acquired a fiery stubbornness previously unknown to the rest of them).

Living in the rooms closest to the two of them, both he and Ben had a good idea of the ongoing rivalry that had seemed to have sprung between them overnight. Between Five’s increased pacing through space and Vanya’s relentless runs on Schubert, the universe had somehow flipped their roles on who would come barging into the other’s room to complain about the noise.

By the time Sunday came around and allowed them the extra time to themselves, Ben and Klaus were looking forward more to the end of the bet than actually participating in it. The boys had taken to staying at each other’s rooms to get away from whichever one of the other two were more dangerous to cross for the day: shy, sweet Vanya whose violin was so incredibly ear-catching but so painfully tempestuous when confronted or grumpy old Five who would pop into your room with no warning and throw things at you for being Too Loud?

Eventually, it came to a point where the others would clear the room depending on who was there.

Not that it changed much of anything for Vanya.

Having only one instance where she witnessed Diego do a complete U-turn upon seeing her and Five enter the kitchen, Vanya only had a slight inkling over which areas in the house were considered “safe” zones, but the library was more or less considered neutral territory.

Having different class schedules now that the rest of the Academy had training while she didn’t, Vanya found many of the rooms accessible to her was frequented less by her siblings simply because they would rather be resting in the basement lounge or in the comfort of their own rooms when they finally managed to escape their father’s ministrations. When they had mutual breaks, they were all drawn to spend their free time elsewhere; aside from study hall (which Five didn’t really need), there was no reason to waste their precious free time in the stuffy old library.

Which, perhaps, was why she felt so wrongfooted when she kept running into Five in the library.

The first time she runs into him, she finds him teleporting two feet from her to stare intently at the shelf that contained their collection of Western folklore.

“What are _you_ doing here?” She asks, surprise catching her off-guard quicker than her brain-to-mouth filter could.

It was a rather strange place to see him. As far as Vanya knew, the boy shared Luther and Diego’s pragmatic sense of literature and rarely ever ventured outside of textbooks and manuals.

Her skepticism must have come off more accusatory than she’d intended because the boy quickly folded his arms and feigned casual disinterest.

“Last I checked, I live here,” Five says, pulling down a book and putting it back after giving it a cursory glance, not minding how Vanya barely managed to suppress a cringe. It was the same argument she’d been throwing at him for the past few days.

“No that’s—I meant I didn’t expect to see you here. Didn’t think you’re a fantasy kind of guy,” she says, scrambling for something to fill in the awkwardness between them.

And, okay, it wasn’t the best way to greet someone you were kind of in a fight with. But Vanya had very little to talk to Five with even on a normal day. He wasn’t like Ben. She couldn’t hold a conversation over books on Topology she’s never even held let alone read.

And he was just…there.

Why was he there?

He shoves one hand into his trouser’s pocket and does his best to not look at her directly. He picks up another book—this time on Henry Fielding’s accounts of Tom Thumb—and barely glances at her when he dismissively replies:

“True. I usually only read what’s _actually_ useful.”

Vanya frowns. “Excuse me?”

“I don’t see how this would help you revolutionize anything substantial,” he says, idly flicking through pages.

She narrows her eyes at him.

Was he only here to make thinly-veiled pokes at her? But he _did_ seem to be reading through the selection with genuine confusion. She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“Just because it isn’t useful _to you_ doesn’t mean it’s not useful for someone else,” she glares at him. “Stories are important, especially for artists.”

Five made a non-committal noise. He pointed at a slim brown poetry book on the opposite shelf she’d passed by earlier.

“That’s not a story. That’s just a collection of fragmented thoughts,” he points out.

Vanya rolls her eyes in response.

“You can’t experience everything the world has to offer but you can try to understand the lives other people live. What they _feel_ ,” she argues but Five still looked unconvinced.

So she decides to take on a new approach.

_How do I say this in a way an arrogant, holier-than-thou rationalist would understand?_ She thinks it over.

“The best art takes inspiration from many different places,” she starts off. “Stories can…move you. Help make things click for you. And I want my music to help things click for others, too. Isn’t it the same with science?”

He looks up at her then.

Emboldened, Vanya went on to elaborate. “Isn’t that why you have peer-reviewed journals? You can’t know everything. Sometimes you don’t have the tech to understand it all yet, like that guy that thought atoms looked like plum pudding.”

The blue of his eyes always gives him an added air of intensity. For a moment she thinks that he’d say… _something_. In defense of the scientific community or maybe just another annoying quip. But then he just continues to stare at her.

“Bohr wouldn’t have developed his first model of the atom without learning from Nicholson’s mistakes, and even they’d be nothing without Planck and Einstein,” He says to her, but something in his voice made it sound more like it was meant for himself.

Was that a concession? It felt like one.

God, can’t he _stop staring_ like that?

She looks away first, making a show of looking around the library. Maybe Ben was reading nearby and could save her from the weird passive-aggressive mood Five was in.

Staring to psych her out. Honestly. How old was he?

“Why are you even here?” She huffs.

_That_ seemed to do the trick. He quickly looks away, shrugging.

“Ah, well,” he says, deflecting her question. “I’m done with this. Here.”

He handed her the copy of Alexander Afanasyev’s _Narodnye russkie skazki_ he was holding before zapping out of existence, leaving her to the once-again deserted library without any explanation.

It only got stranger from there.

For some reason, he kept popping up.

He never stayed but he did like to just…hover around to look at what she was working on before leaving again.

At first, she thinks that it was some kind of reconnaissance. Maybe even an attempt at sabotage. But then he started to do something even weirder and leave books on her table that moved toward the sort of fantasies she loved to read for inspiration.

It baffled her for a week. She couldn’t make sense of what the strange little boy was up to.

Or she didn’t until she caught him sneaking glances from behind her while she was reading _Narodnye russkie skazki_.

It was a collection of Russian fairy tales that reminded her a lot of the Grimm brothers’ work. There were the common themes of magic and problems to be solved, but there was something so quaint about the emphasis on the places and objects in the Russian stories. Even the illustrations straddled the line between romanticism and the ethereal—the magic found in the mundane.

For a random pull, Five had good taste.

Which led Vanya into thinking that perhaps it wasn’t all that random after all.

It makes perfect sense, really. She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of it sooner. It explained why he was always so jumpy around her and why he kept lurking just near enough to catch what she was reading and why he was always seemed to go to the library when it was all but deserted aside from the two of them.

Five _liked_ silly little fairytales!

_He must be so embarrassed_ , she thought to herself when the epiphany dawned on her. She could have sworn she had caught him trying to read over her shoulder when the other Academy members had walked into the basement lounge.

Traditional fairy tales were fantastic things to behold and often took a morbid turn when it went down the side of cautionary tales but more modern, cartoonish adaptations took the ideas of fairies and sprites and other mythical creatures of old and put glitter on them to sell dolls and dresses to little girls like her.

_No wonder he’s so secretive about it_ , she thinks, watching her other brothers poke fun at Ben for settling on the couch to read a book like an old man. _The others would never let him live it down._

It was a shame. Five seemed to really be interested in those books, too. If only he didn’t let his overblown ego get in the way of simple joys just for the sake of looking cool.

The boy had the audacity to stare down the barrel of a gun and be completely at ease. What was it about folklore and old wives’ tales that made him behave so oddly?

_He’s so shy about the strangest things_ , she thinks, shaking her head. It amused her to no end.

Okay. Competition aside, maybe she could give him an inch there.

It was just difficult to stay mad at someone so ridiculous.

So she starts taking note of the books he has, too, and pulls down volumes the way he did for her as well. She becomes more familiar with titles such as _Causality and Chance in Modern Physics_ , _Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics_ , and _The Character of Physical Law_ as she paid more attention to his reading habits.

Eventually, they find themselves falling into a pattern.

She’d leave books just near enough the spot he’d put his ‘recommendation pile’ at her end of the table. It was placed just so that anyone passing by would confuse her books for his and vice versa. Then, they’d spend the rest of the time silently working on vastly different things at the same table.

They didn’t talk. Then again, they didn’t need to.

It worked out just fine for them.

**Author's Note:**

> I initially intended this to be a oneshot for Tori during Fiveya week but, well...I get a little wordy sometimes 😂 As it stands, this series is one of five arcs that belong to _The Art of Pretending_ , as follows:
> 
> I. How it ends  
>  _A series of snippets of Five and Vanya's friendship before Five's disappearance_
> 
> II. Five  
>  _A comprehensive account of everything he didn't know back then (including but not limited to indoor plumbing). He really should have picked up a manual or his notes before jumping forward to 2019._
> 
> III. The point between rage and serenity  
>  _Set in the Sparrowverse with the rest of their siblings, where Five and Vanya wonder at the mess of it all._
> 
> IV. Vanya  
>  _Life as Vanya had let it pass by. It's not a very interesting story. It wasn't even a happy one. But it's hers._
> 
> V. How it begins  
>  _Five and Vanya wonder at the persistence of memory._
> 
> Hope y'all like it. See you again next week ✨✨✨


End file.
